TWO THINGS by SLOANE ANGELOU
i want your tongue in my mouth
when i get back home i want your clothes
on the floor and your tongue in my mouth;
imagine what it would be like to taste
your pleasure rocking back and forth
in such thickness
to lean into this temptation
your tongue in my mouth
my hands on your body
our love grinding against the world
why must we be delivered from it
on a...
a Saturday morning
a Sunday night
a weak day
your fingers around
my throat my fingers digging into your back
our bodies throbbing against our neighbors frowns…
no amount of angry strangers could stop your heat from warming the tongue in my mouth.
I wonder if I can lay my mother to rest by writing her out
I miss my mother.
Mummy slips into almost everything I write these days. I have tried so hard to write her out but it still hurts. The heavy weight in my chest, the ache at the back of my neck, the tears that well up from my throat rush straight to my eyes every time I let myself feel her presence as a memory. It hurts so much. This is one of the reasons why I hate memories.
Every time I speak about my mother I have to explain that I have had and lost two of them in my short life. I do not miss them equally, how can I ? It would ruin me, it would be completely unbearable to put myself through that kind of mental destruction. I cannot indulge my emotions enough to remember them at once.
The mother that weighs on my mind heavier than the other; she raised me by herself and she died more recently than the other. A silent death. A painful memory. A suicide. Leaving me, an abandoned child. Overnight I went from having everything - my mother, to having nothing - myself.
It's so easy these days for my head to absorb aches. Can you imagine? Feeling an ache at every turn, things in my head are constantly aching and I have no way to deal with them. I know death will stop the aching but I cannot die today or tomorrow or ten years from now. Even death has abandoned me. It has refused to look me in the eyes and tell me why it took my whole family from me in less than three years, why it stripped me naked, why why why. I have refused to die because death has refused to accept me or tell me why it took my mothers from me.
In silence, out of pain, for survival, I have tried to write my mother out of my eyes into poems, out of my mouth into tweets, out of my headaches into weeping still she lingers. It must sound as though I am trying to forget my mother and what if I am?, her memory is my inheritance. I get to decide what I want to do with it. I did not ask for it. I did not ask for this. She left me a note; a suicide note delivered in hand by a complete stranger who could not look me in the eye when he handed it over, he simply said something in French that I could not have understood in that moment, he was in such a rush to get away from me, we simply assumed he was trying to tell us she did not need me to write back. She was already gone.
my sweetheart I love you, run. Leave this godforsaken region and never comeback. I love you, you know that. So run. Like the good lord almighty I will be with you always until the end of time. By Friday I will be gone for good and they will not let you have my body but you don't need it you don't need me my sweetheart. God bless you. I love you.
And this is how you render a memory useless, by making it public. By stripping it of its preciousness.
She must have left her scent on the paper or handwritten, whatever it was I saw and felt something that made me know it was from her before my fountain of tears soaked the paper into indignation. I did not need to keep the note. I can still smell it. Maybe now I have written those words out, I will be set free at least for a day or a week or a year. A thing can only wish. It is me, I am a thing in this moment that needs to forget or be forgotten.
I wonder if writing will help me lay my mother to rest.
Sloane Angelou is a storyteller & writer of West African origin; passionate about learning of human existence by interrogating human experiences. They exist in liminal spaces.